Donald Davidson (poet)

Donald Davidson (1893-1968) in 1956. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Donald Grady Davidson (August 8, 1893 - April 25, 1968) was an American poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and prose author. He is best known as a founding member of the Nashville, Tennessee, circle of poets known as the Fugitives and of an overlapping group, the Southern Agrarians.

Life

Davidson was born in Campbellville, in Giles Country, Tennessee, to William Bluford Davidson, a teacher and school administrator, and Elma Wells Davidson, a music and elocution teacher. He received a classical education at Branham and Hughes preparatory school in Spring Hill, Tennessee. He earned both his bachelor's (1917) and master's (1922) degrees at Vanderbilt University. He served as a lieutenant in the United States Army during World War I. In June 1918 he married Theresa Sherrer, a legal scholar and artist.

While at Vanderbilt, Davidson became associated with the Fugitives, who met to read and criticize each other's verse. Later they founded a review of the same name, which launched the literary careers of poets and critics John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, poet Laura Riding, and poet and psychiatrist Merrill Moore. He enjoyed a national reputation as a poet, in part due to the inclusion of his dramatic monologue, "Lee in the Mountains", in early editions of the influential college literature textbook Understanding Poetry. Its editors were his former students Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

From 1923 to 1930, Davidson reviewed books and edited the Nashville Tennessean book page, where he assessed more than 370 books. The book page was well respected and syndicated to other newspapers.

Around 1930, Davidson began his association with the Southern Agrarians. He was chiefly responsible for the decision of the group to write essays, published as the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand. Davidson shared the Agrarians' distaste for industrial capitalism and its destructive effect on American culture. Davidson's romantic outlook, however, led him to interpret Agrarianism as a straightforward politics of identity. "American" identity had become "characterless and synthetic," he argued in 1933. He encouraged Americans to embrace their identities as "Rebels, Yankees, Westerners, New Englanders or what you will, bound by ties more generous than abstract institutions can express, rather than citizens of an Americanized nowhere, without family, kin, or home." He was in favor of segregation.

In 1931 Davidson began a long association with Middlebury College's Breadloaf School of English. He bought a house in Vermont where he did much of his later writing. He taught at the Breadloaf School every summer until his death. In 1939 his textbook, American Composition and Rhetoric, was published and widely adopted for English courses in American universities.

Perhaps most widely read today is Davidson's two-volume history: The Tennessee (1946 and 1948), in the Rivers of America series. The second volume is notable for its critique of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the impact of its dam-building and eminent-domain land seizure on local society. He also chaired the pro-segregation group, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government.

Davidson retired from teaching in 1964. A comprehensive collection of his poetry, Poems: 1922-61, was published in 1966. He died in 1968 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Recognition

He received honorary doctorates from Cumberland University, Washington and Lee University, and Middlebury College.

In 1952 his ballad opera, Singin' Billy, with music by Charles F. Bryan, was performed at the Vanderbilt Theater. His work as book page editor for the Nashville Tennessean was commemorated in 1963 with the publication of The Spyglass: Views and reviews, 1924-1930.

Publications

Poetry

• An Outland Piper. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924.
• The Tall Men. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927.
• Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938.
• The Long Street (engravings by Theresa Sherrer Davidson). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1961.
• Collected Poems: 1922-1961. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1966.

Novels

• The Big Ballad Jamboree. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

Opera

• Singin' Billy (1952)

Non-fiction

• I'll Take My Stand: The south and the Agrarian tradition by twelve southerners (with others). New York: Harper, 1930..
• British Poetry of the Eighteen-Nineties. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1937.
• Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and nationalism in the United States (1938)
  • Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962.
• The Tennessee (illustrated by Theresa Sherrer Davidson). New York & Toronto: Rinehart & Co., 1946, 1948.
• Rivers of America (1948)
• Still Rebels, Still Yankees, and other essays. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1957.]
• Southern Writers in the Modern World. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1958.
• American Composition and Rhetoric
  • (4th edition), New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959.
• The Spyglass: Views and reviews, 1924-1930 (selected and edited by John Tyree Fain). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1963.

Letters

• The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate . Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1974.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat..

See also

Donald Davidson, "Fire on Belmont Street" (1927)

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Lee in the Mountains"
• Donald (Grady) Davidson 1893-1968 at the Poetry Foundation
• Donald Grady Davidson at AllPoetry (7 poems)

About

• Donald Davidson at the Tennesee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
• Donald Davidson and the South's Conservatism
• "Philosopher-Poet of the Rednecks: Donald Davidson and the defense of the agrarian south'